For decades, NASA has been the world’s most prominent space agency. Since first landing
astronauts on the moon in 1969, it has launched all manner of probes, rovers and shuttles out of
Earth’s atmosphere and into the great unknown. But, of course, there are mysteries still yet
to be solved on our own planet… so what would happen if NASA turned its attention to those?
This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question;
what if NASA explored the ocean instead?
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It doesn’t have quite as a high a profile as NASA, but there is already a major US government
agency dedicated to exploring the ocean; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
otherwise known as NOAA. Which is… a pretty great name! Among its many responsibilities, NOAA is
tasked with studying the ocean and finding ways to protect it. We know that seventy-one percent of
the Earth’s surface is covered in water, and that ninety-six percent of that water is found
in the oceans. So, we’re dealing with a truly incredible space here, home to millions of animals
and lifeforms and, according to some theories, the place where all life on Earth started. It’s
amazing, and a little depressing, then, that today more than eighty percent of the ocean remains
unexplored. There’s still so much we don’t know! Reasons for that lack of exploration can be found
in the budget. While NASA received $23.2 billion dollars’ worth of funding for the year 2021,
NOAA received $5.4 billion dollars. If we take only the cold, stark, fiscal figures, then,
we could say that the US government essentially provides ocean exploration with less than one
quarter the financial backing that it does for space. Of course, in reality it’s perhaps not
as simple as all that, but for the purposes of today’s video it’s interesting to imagine what
we could achieve if the mighty NASA swapped stars for starfish. In a manner of speaking.
We can find some hints as to what might happen in various existing initiatives where NASA and NOAA
have already partnered up. Most crossover studies today involve NASA making use of NOAA weather
satellites, which monitor everything from tropical storms to melting ice caps. We know thanks to
various headline-making missions that NASA is now a dab hand at mapping moons and other planets.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, for example, has captured high-definition images reportedly
covering ninety-nine percent of the surface of Mars. So, if NASA explored the oceans instead,
we might expect similarly sharp maps of the waters around us, allowing scientists to focus
in on any one square mile (or even square meter) of ocean topography - perhaps even in real time.
If four times the funding were to amount to four times the coverage of our seas from above,
then it could mean better than ever wave monitoring, weather predictions,
coastal erosion tracking, and even ship and plane tracking - potentially making shipwrecks
and downed planes far easier to find, too. But, of course, that opening statistic that
more than eighty percent of the ocean remains unexplored doesn’t, for the most part,
relate to the surface water. And, indeed, through various projects in the past,
NASA has had a helping hand in charting our seas before now. But where it could really make a
difference in ocean study is beneath the waves. Doctor Gene Carl Feldman is an oceanographer
currently working with NASA. In June 2020, though, he spoke to Emily Petsko at the
non-profit conservation group, Oceana, to explain why ocean exploration has so far been so limited.
According to Feldman, it’s arguably easier to send people to space than it is to the sea floor,
thanks to the “intense pressures in the deep ocean”. Feldman goes on to show that,
for a dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench - the deepest part of the ocean - it’s “1,000
times more pressure than at the surface [which is] the equivalent of the weight of 50 jumbo jets”.
Of course, on a mission into the vacuum of space it’s adjusting to low air pressure that’s usually
the problem… so, if NASA turned its gaze inwards, then it would mean inverting a lot of its tech.
But we’ve shown time and again in recent history that it can be done. In 1960, we saw the first
crewed submersible, the Trieste, reach Challenger Deep (the deepest part of the Mariana Trench).
In 2012, there was the first solo voyage to the same region; a high-profile mission piloted
by the film director James Cameron, on board the Deepsea Challenger vessel. Then, in 2018,
the explorer Victor Vescovo piloted the Limiting Factor submersible to the deepest part of the
Atlantic Ocean, in the Puerto Rico Trench. It was the first stage in his pioneering Five Deeps
Expedition, which saw him visit the deepest parts of all the world’s oceans. With these
success stories in mind, then, it’s perhaps a little frustrating that we haven’t gone further.
One issue is that all deep-sea missions are severely limited by time. James Cameron’s voyage
on Deepsea Challenger, for example, set various time duration records, but the filmmaker was still
only able to explore for about three hours. By comparison, the Apollo 11 moon landing saw
astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin spend more than twenty-one hours on the lunar surface,
including about two-and-a-half hours outside of the module. Perhaps, then,
if NASA were to go underwater in earnest, we would eventually see an equivalent achievement…
a long-stay submersible rooted to the ocean floor, with technology to allow oceanauts to
leave their vessel for first-hand exploration. What’s perhaps more likely, though, is that with
a NASA-sized budget behind it, agencies like NOAA could deploy more and more uncrewed vehicles to
get a better picture of what lies beneath. In 2019, the Ocean Discovery XPrize was contested
by a number of groups, all striving to build robots to map the ocean floor. Meanwhile there are
initiatives like Seabed 2030, which aims to map 100 percent of the seafloor by 2030… as well as
the 30by30 campaign, which aims to protect thirty percent of the world’s oceans by the same year.
We have had remote controlled, deep-sea vehicles for a number of decades now, but there are few
machines to match the scope and capabilities of NASA’s various probes, rovers and orbiters in
space. If there were multiple vehicles at this level, working round the clock underwater, and
directed by specialists behind computer screens on dry land, then we could quickly get to know the
sea just as well as we know the moon or Mars. What’s perhaps most significant to realise,
however, is that in many ways ocean exploration and space discovery are one and the same thing.
So, the question at the top of today’s video doesn’t actually require such an extreme change of
direction. In recent years, astrobiologists have already turned to the sea in search for answers,
particularly when it comes to the search for aliens. Up until the 1970s, around the time
when we first started using remote-controlled robots in the ocean, there had been a general
idea that there couldn’t be much by the way of life surviving down there. Today, of course, we
know that there’s so much life in even the deepest parts of the ocean thanks to our so far limited
attempts to explore it… and that revelation has forced us to rethink what’s possible. The
parameters for life have already been drastically altered thanks to ocean study, then… which has
already had an impact on how we view space. Astrobiologists are today particularly interested
in the possibility of subsurface oceans across various solar system locations - including the gas
giant moons of Titan, Enceladus and Europa. It’s thought that if there is alien life close to us,
then these bodies of water are probably the best bet for where it could be hiding. It makes sense,
then, that before we can even hope to explore unknown oceans elsewhere in the solar system,
we should really get to grips with our own. More than that, though, when it comes to our
current deep-sea missions it’s so often the case that they report back findings of all new,
never-before-seen species - new types of deep-sea worm, or fish, or octopus.
In many ways, these are already alien creatures to our eyes. They’ve evolved to live and thrive in a
truly extreme environment. And NASA researchers can learn a huge amount of information from how
these creatures work. Information that could be used to hunt biosignatures away from Earth, yes,
but also to develop novel ways for humans to survive in similarly extraordinary places.
So, ultimately, it would be a success on two fronts. We still know so little about
the oceans that are all around us, but NASA could dramatically improve our understanding
if it were to turn its full attention to them. And comprehensive ocean maps spanning from the
surface to the deepest depths would surely become some of our most valuable scientific tools.
Equally, though, if the world’s leading space agency paid closer attention to the sea,
and if greater funding was pledged to ocean study in general,
then we could quickly make massive strides toward comprehending the rest of space, as well.
And that’s what would happen if NASA explored the Ocean instead.
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